The [Andreas] Papandreou era in Greece was, writes Georges Prévélakis, “characterized by the prime minister’s jocular statement that it was the right of any political official or civil servant to ‘allow himself a little gift’, providing he did not exceed certain limits. By tolerating corruption, PASOK ensured that it had even greater control over the administration.”

“ ... Rather than stimulating modernization, Greece’s participation in the EEC, the European Union and the eurozone acted as an anaesthetic. Protected by an over-indulgent Europe, Greeks lost all sense of economic and social reality. Ease, laxity and parasitism prevailed. Electors rejected political leaders who advocated policies of austerity, preferring promises of jobs, salary increases and early retirement. Politicians were elected who were prepared to tolerate corruption, closed shops in certain professions, oligarchies and so on. The state, as intermediary between Greece and Europe, was entrusted with the management of the flow of cash. As a result it became bloated and suffocated the private sector. The European opportunity that had been created by the efforts of [Kostas] Karamanlis in the 1960s and 1970s was transformed into an economic, political and moral disaster.”

The Greek problem is not economic; it is political, Prévélakis argues. It is a matter of how the state functions. “The building of the modern state was carried out, with difficulty, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with advances and retreats. In order to win the allegiance of the rural population, who were resorting to banditry in response to imported political modernity, the central power used the mechanisms of state, not only as an instrument of repression, but also as a system with which to distribute a kind of income or tribute. The principal currency was recruitment by the state. Initially, a post in government service was the reward for submission pure and simple; later the prize was suffrage.

“This compromise by the Athenian elites, discreditable as it was, partly explains the governments’ chronic budget deficits. It also explains the administration’s lack of efficacy. Senior administrators were recruited under criteria that had little to do with competence. Civil servants felt that they had obtained a sinecure rather than a mission to be fulfilled. If this was so, what was the point in working?”

Georges Prévélakis’s essay, first published in the French journal Esprit, has been translated and republished by Eurozine.
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